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- One of the best things about Nix, aside from LLMs being able to manage your config, is having a monorepo that contains the config across all machines (shared and machine-unique), like hosts/{nas,macbook}/{configuration.nix,home.nix,modules/}.
Now I have the same setup across my macbook, desktop, and NixOS servers.
by hombre_fatal - After using NixOS for a bit and eventually learning to rely on it, life without it seems inconceivably complexby rekoros
- NixOS has been my daily driver since 2022/2023 and I have greatly improved the management of my 2 computers and few VMs since. Because of LLMs, I now understand the language much better, but even if I didn't want to write Nix directly, describing the config to AI usually produces good results.
The two main sticking points IMO are still:
- Development environments are still a pain. devenv.sh is great for web and backend, but not perfect for dependency (package) management and more complicated environments like mobile or embedded
- nixpkgs monorepo doesn't update fast enough IMO. As a consequence, I see a number of flake repositories popping up to more easily package and distribute software not yet on nixpkgs or that don't update often enough (https://github.com/numtide/llm-agents.nix is a good example). This is perhaps by design, but it takes some digging to find the reliable and trustworthy flake repos. I'm increasingly concerned with AUR-like trust issues
by chem83 - I really love NixOS for my two devices, one surface laptop (lol), and my nvidia pc. It reduced my headaches with drivers so much.
Before updating my nvidia driver or something related to my surface I was scared to break something. With NixOS I can just go back to the old working config.
Another underappreciated feature about NixOS is, that you can create a VM out of a NixOS config to locally test a server update/deployment.
by AyanamiKaine - BTW, there is a NixOS.wsl for Win11 and Nix-Darwin for macOS and the Nix package manager runs on any Linux. You could run Fedora and configure somethings with Nix.
Nix excels at solving real world problems for developers. No more "Well, it worked on my machine". You setup a flake.nix in your code repo along with direnv and even that new junior dev can merely clone the repo and all the dependencies are installed by the flake.nix configuration file. Including the language and IDE configuration for the team. i.e. tabs vs spaces and whatnot. The same flake.nix can be applied to your CI / CD to help with reliable builds. You can also use it to create Kubernetes and other containers or a bare metal NixOS server. Keep all the configs in git and run them straight from the repo.
It's great for ensuring your devs don't break the freaking build by updating something with npm, etc. You should audit anything you install due to the severe threat of supply chain attacks. Recently impacting Node.js and Arch Linux AUR, etc.
Yes, LLMs can write quite a lot of Nix but they don't necessarily get down to the nitty gritty best practices. So you need to be careful with it. You should also audit your configuration for security issues.
by Nerdrotic - I love seeing all these posts from NixOS newcomers! It seems anecdotally like LLMs have really given it a boost recently, I guess by reducing the intimidation factor of the language and the unfamiliarity? Of all the positive and negative outcomes I have imagined from LLMs, NixOS becoming popular was not one of them, but I'll take it.by mplanchard
- I had quite a rollercoaster going from Windows 10 to Arch to Windows and then settling on NixOS. Main reason being able to do clean package/program setup and centralize, version-control my configuration.
My main issue with Arch was that after installing and trying stuff it left OS dirty even after package removal. This might be because I had some things built and installed through AUR (e.g. latest mpv releases that sometimes broke). Eventually I went back to latest Windows 11 build wanting easy no-bs setup.
Of course, then MS decides to shove down half baked AI integration that somehow used half my RAM and randomly slowed my CPU. I am guessing it was busy indexing, searching or security-scanning something.
Got increasingly annoyed by Microslop and tried NixOS. Bumpy ride initially but after committing for few weeks I am finally settling on it be the last OS I need.
by tomalaci - I switched my workstation over to NixOS ~6 weeks ago and it's been really good, I'm a total convert. The thing that really got me over the hump was entirely configuring it using Claude Code.
One unexpected benefit is that both my workstation and my backup laptop have the same setup, so I can run updates on the scratch box before doing my workstation. I decided to run the "latest" rather than 25.11 release, so it's nice to test before I apply (I hit a GDM issue a few weeks ago that left me at a black screen; but not a huge deal, just select the "previous" option in the grub screen).
I've got everything to parity with what I had on my previous Ubuntu workstation. I had anticipated issues with some software that isn't packaged (but NixOS packages a LOT), but that wasn't an issue. Claude was able to do all those things no problem.
The biggest tricky bit was with my vim setup; I've been using AstroVIM and trying to get away from managing my own vim setup. You can't, AFAICT, just apply astrovim in NixOS. So I described the vim setup I wanted to Claude Code, and I now have a ~700 line config that implements everything I wanted: LSP, TreeSitter, a small variety of other things. Unlike Astro/Lunar, where tweaks you want to make are buried in some set of files in this whole giant distro, it is all encoded in this one "neovim.nix" file.
I also set up home-manager and SOPS and so far that has been working just great! I now have home directory settings that are replicated across 2 machines.
I'm still really only using it on one machine, so we'll see how it gets more complicated if I start running it on some servers.
by linsomniac